With this artwork, I decided to focus on my particular experiences navigating with English as a second language, and my relationship with communication on a day-to-day basis while trying to bring together my background, my cultural heritage, and my worldview in a culture very different from my own. For this, I have developed a three-dimensional installation composed of reinterpretations of handwritten words formed in wood and draped with threads. The text is an original poem written in both Spanish and English.
There are two sets of handwriting styles, one based on my own for the English text, and one based on my mother’s for the Spanish text. The content of this poem is a collection of memories of all the places I have lived in my life. Each place corresponds to a line in the poem, and each line is conceptually attached to the previous and the following one, becoming a solid narrative that tells a bigger story.
I wanted to focus on the human component of handwriting as being indicative of the person behind the message, and given my intention of imbuing meanings to letters and words, the use of handwriting became a way to indicate the presence of my mother and myself in the narrative.
The function of the threads in the whole structure is to illustrate the entanglement of these two languages that in time represent my life in Colombia and the United States, informing what I am now, a hybrid between cultures.
